


Avalanche

by saltbreaker



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/M, Falling In Love, Happy Ending because these two deserve it damnit, Natasha Needs a Hug, Pining, Romance, Steve Rogers is a Ray of Sunshine, send help, the honesty and complexity, this ship will be the death of me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-27 02:43:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12571968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltbreaker/pseuds/saltbreaker
Summary: Steve's smile is sweet, but not without edges. Something in her blood heats and sings, and Natasha smiles to herself. She likes Steve.





	Avalanche

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chalantness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chalantness/gifts), [InitialA](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InitialA/gifts), [LiquidCaliban](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiquidCaliban/gifts), [beezyland](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beezyland/gifts), [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



> [deep breaths] I finally mustered enough courage to post this. This is my very first SteveNat fic so it's a little bumpy. Please tread gently. ;)

_I want to love, but my hair smells of war and running and running._

_-Warsan Shire_

 

The first time Natasha met Steve Rogers on a Hellicarier, there was the expanse of an endless blue sky and the rolling of white clouds in the background.

A simple perfunctory greeting of " _Hi"_ from her, yet he made his reply of " _Ma'am_ " sounded a lot earnest than a first greeting should be.  

She almost snorted. Almost. 

_Is this man for real?_

When he gave her another smile, the bright horizon paled in comparison.

 . 

She thinks he was naive, at first. A damn fool. 

Their world is full of blood and betrayal. Of violence and deceit. A never ending war, and she couldn't grasp how someone could still be perpetually sanguine. Hopeful.

 _Foolish._  

The world isn't black and white, she learned it the hard way. The people you thought you trusted would turn with a lie and bite you with their teeth. 

But his light never falters, it remains untainted all the same. Strong, and sometimes overwhelming in intensity. How could anyone live in a world as dark and horrible as theirs and still remain unshakably good? Natasha didn't understand. She's never met someone like him before, never thought someone like him existed.

"There's a chance you might be in the wrong business."

Steve's smile is sweet, but not without edges. Something in her blood heats and sings, and Natasha smiles to herself.

She likes Steve.

. 

Natasha is incredibly pissed. At Steve. 

Steve, who jumped in front of her like the big, self-sacrificing idiot he was. He made it back into the jet with two bullets in his shoulder and Natasha was deathly silent as they fly back to the facility.

“Nat?” She glances at him but doesn’t answer. “I thought usually when someone takes a bullet for you, you're not angry at them.” He lays his right hand over the dressing of his wound, pressing it down even though it doesn’t seem to be bleeding profusely anymore.

Natasha clenches her teeth. She deliberated on whether or not to snap at him. “What the hell were you thinking?" She hisses. 

Steve shifts uncomfortably, "Natasha, I-"

"I didn’t need saving,” she cut him off bitingly. “I’ve been shot before, I don’t need someone to take bullets for me."

Steve winces and leans forward to look at her. “Nat, if there’s a chance that I can take the hit instead of one of my team, then I’m going to take it,” he says firmly. _Stubbornly._ “It doesn’t matter if it’s you or Tony or anyone else.”

Because he's endlessly good and brave — keeps fighting despite of the many people he has lost.

_He can't afford to lose more._

His features soften into a slight smile, gently bumping his thigh against hers _._  She swallows a sudden lump in her throat.

_Damn you, Rogers._

Her mouth quirks into a smile. "I would think twice about saving Tony, if I were you," she teases dryly, trying for some levity. 

He startles a bit, then laughs. The world makes a little more sense when he did. 

 .

Steve wants to know how his war ended. He finds out about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his nightmares take on a new dimension. Maybe it's because of who he is, because he still wears the stars and stripes, but he decides it's his responsibility to know what else happened while he was asleep. 

Natasha tells him to stop seeking out the things he wished he could have prevented, he listens to her. 

One day, she saw the weariness in his eyes; the look on his face, the one he uses when he thinks no one is looking. _Of pure exhaustion and pain_. The pain he kept hidden from the very people he tried to protect. Natasha's heart squeezes in her chest.

But it never stops him from fighting or impair his judgement. Of making people want to be better versions of themselves. 

"I'm not a good person, Steve, but thank you for saying so," she says and smiles softly.

"You are a good person, Natasha. I don't care who you were, I care who you are. I care that you suit up with me. That you have debts to pay and you pay them. Okay, Nat? I care about who you choose to be," he says in all earnest, broad shoulders dipping to bring his face closer to hers.

He gives her a blinding smile. 

She stares at him and a fire impossibly soft and exquisitely painful burns behind her sternum. Her smile falters as she realizes her heart has betrayed her in more ways than one. In her mind, the one silence even Steve's enhanced hearing can't penetrate, she thinks a traitorous word.

_Love._

_._

Natasha opens her windows wherever in the world she is, and thinks of the night in DC, sometimes warm, muggy, and smelling of exhaust, sometimes chilled, stinging, metallic. Steve's laugh and the feel of his skin against her accompany each memory like the drag of a dull blade across her mind. The memories of being not alone are lesions distantly, eternally bleeding.

She thinks of Steve when there was no space between them, and she feels alive. She wishes she could go back.

_He pulls himself away, taking her face in his hands. "What is this?"_

_In the dim light of the room, her brow creases and she bites her lower lip. "_ _I-" she starts and stops, then forces herself to keep talking. His eyes are fixed on her, and she_ _makes herself return his gaze, "I like you. I like us." She clears her throat. "Do you?"_

_"God, yes," he says, pulling her back against him, his mouth on the side of her neck._

.

But Natasha always manages to catch herself before she walks too far down the dangerous path of dreams, a path that lead straight into those stars beyond her open windows.

_"This thing between us isn't going to work-"_

_"Bullshit!" She flinches at his words. "You told me you want this, you want us." She can't stand the pain in his eyes but moreso the shine of devotion in them._

_He captures her hands with warm fingers frantically. There is something about the gesture, as if he needs to anchor himself, and it clogs up her throat._

_And even with words like fate and destiny swirling in the air, in her mind, wrapping around her like chains, he believes she still has a choice. It's a beautiful picture he's painting, and she can't help but gaze at it with him._

Maybe there is a path to those stars always just beyond her reach and Steve Rogers can see it.

_"Steve, you and I, this. I-" she balks._

_She's terrified of falling._

_She's scared because she's never wanted anything this much before. She's lived a life where things were wretched out suddenly from her grasps, lives in the knowledge that she doesn't deserve good things. And Steve is good._

_She needs him but she-_

Coward.

_She needs to leave._

_"I'm sorry, Steve."_

_Steve tells her he's in love with her. She runs into the night._

 .

"You're a fucking idiot, Nat. The man loves you," Clint tells him outright.

_It hurts because it's true._

"I'm not good enough for him," she argues, even though the words taste bitter in her mouth.

She remember the doors closed in her face, barring her from the light, and reminds herself that there is no going back for people like her. Shadows and light can never mix.

Steve deserves better. She repeats it to herself until it tastes like blood in her mouth.

.

When she has nightmares, they invariably involve two moments, crossbred and mutated into monstrosities to stalk her sleeping mind.

She remembers so much _blood on her hands_.

She remembers Steve looking at her with disappointment. 

Standing deep in the heart of her recent hideaway, she finds herself confronted with the reality in the light of day.

Steve's touch, his words, _his faith in her_.

_She ache in places she didn't know she had inside of her._

.

She won't let herself think of him for a long time. Months without speaking his name leaves her with a sensation of cooling ash in her chest, as if any mention of his name might stoke the fire back to life.

She hears his name for the first time in a long time and her smile pulls like a scar tissue when Tony asked her to speak to him about the Accords. 

In a moment of weakness, she listens to her heart.

 _"_ _I didn't want you to be alone."_

She's not foolish enough to to think that human beings are capable of being more than alone — not anymore. But in that moment with Steve, she feels something fit into place inside her. 

.

She sees him again after the mess with the Accords. Natasha hasn't smiled so wide or so genuinely since the last time she saw Steve. Something stirs in her veins, humming underneath her skin. It feels like fear, but it's possibly something even more dangerous.

She suspects it's hope.

“You like to think that whatever’s underneath the masks isn’t human,” he says. “That’s the most human thing about you.” 

There’s something in his voice— a mixture of relief and realization that almost makes her gasp. It confirms that yes, he does know her.

_He knows her. He accepts her. He wants her._

_He still loves her._

All of this is said rather softly, almost as if she wasn’t supposed to hear it.

But, she did.

And honestly, it makes her feel like he sees her in a way she never allows herself to.

She chooses what she had already chosen long before when she berated herself for getting emotionally entangled.

_I would trade it all in for a lifetime of feeling your skin._

 .

"Steve," she gasps and bites her lower lip to keep them from trembling. Steve kisses her breathless, his mouth hovers above her chest, his nose nestles against the spot, then places a soft, almost pleading kiss to her heart. 

Her stomach coils with too much love, it unravels and spreads through her entire being. 

_She wanted Steve, all of him. All of this._

When she tries to shift off of him, his arms tighten around her. 

" _Stay_ ," he says. He nuzzles the side of her neck, "'Please." 

He looks at her with that sincere gleam of affection in his eyes. “ _Don’t go_.” This is far more of a request and less of a demand. "Don't." This, being that he isn’t so certain himself, not so much of what he feels for her but that he isn’t enough to keep her with him.

But he's more than enough for her.  _He's everything._

She cups his chin and smiles sweetly and let happy tears fill her eyes as she shakes her head. “ _Never_.” 

She kisses him and lets his warm and soft lips chaste away the remaining shadows from those nights before and the whole of her life, along with all her doubts and fears. 

_"I love you, Steve."_

As the shadows of the room grow darker, his eyes were unbelievably brighter.

 .

 

**Fin**

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't ruin anything, right? Thanks for reading.❤  
> Thoughts? Please?


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